Whilst I was in London for the Spectrum install, I went to see quite a few exhibitions at commercial galleries. Most of these were in Soho and Mayfair because I was a bit time-poor and needed to keep things fairly contained. I only learned relatively recently that you can just go into these sorts of spaces, and I still enjoy the art-roulette of ringing the bell at the ones with locked doors and wondering, first, if anyone is home, and then, if they are, whether they’ll actually let you in.
I am still haunted by the day I rang the bell at a gallery in Berlin and the person on the desk looked at me through the window, made eye contact, and then simply went back to what they were doing without letting me in. There is a particular kind of embarrassment attached to being refused entry to a place that you weren’t even sure you were allowed into in the first place.
There are pros and cons to visiting these sorts of spaces. You see a LOT of painting. Well, I am some sort of painter, so maybe that’s a good thing. I’m also some sort of painter who likes to make the occasional sale, so it is useful to see what the market thinks will sell, or at least what galleries think might be sellable. But there is also an interesting disconnect. This is often not the sort of art you see in public galleries or third-party spaces. It is often, for want of a better term, quite decorative. That isn’t necessarily a criticism, but it does change the way the work seems to function.
There is also often quite a lot of it. I went into a space off Regent Street and saw some quite nice paintings of flowers which just seemed to go on forever. The law of diminishing returns, perhaps, or maybe just confidence. I have come to think that what I am often looking at in contemporary commercial galleries is confidence. I walk around thinking, “this is interesting,” and then, about ten minutes after I’ve left the beautiful building, I find myself thinking, “hang on, that was forty-seven vaguely flat paintings of flowers.” There is something strange about that delayed reaction, as if the atmosphere of the gallery briefly convinces you of the work’s importance and then, once you are back outside, the spell starts to lift.
Anyway, I did see some things that I really liked. At Hales in Shoreditch, I saw Ally Fallon. He won the last edition of the John Moores Painting Prize, and we saw one of his paintings in New Contemporaries at Camberwell during the low-residency week. It was interesting to encounter the work again in a different context, no longer as one painting among many, but as part of a much more sustained presentation of his practice.
He is a real talent. The painting that won the John Moores was terrific. This exhibition was enjoyable and very technically accomplished, but it also gave me pause to think about how you turn a good idea into a body of work, and how much that process might, or should, be driven by commercial imperatives. When you see one of his tiled-floor, gestural-environment paintings in isolation, it is really striking. When you see a room full of them, it somehow becomes a little less interesting and a little less impactful. There is something in the template that, to me, feels too overt. These paintings felt more like formula than iteration, as though the conditions of the paintings had, perhaps, been solved a little too completely.
Is this a bit unfair? Well maybe, but I suppose part of looking carefully is allowing yourself to notice where something does and doesn’t quite land for you. And I did enjoy the exhibition. There were moments of real pleasure in the work, and a level of skill that I absolutely don’t want to dismiss. It was just… you know. It made me think about repetition, and about the point at which repetition becomes a language, or a brand, or maybe even a trap.
I think this opinion was sharpened a couple of days later when I saw Kenjiro Okazaki at Pace in Mayfair (thoughts & prayers). Where Fallon is a relatively early-career artist (his MA was only in 2023), Okazaki has been round the block a good few times. The Pace website tells us that he is “an acclaimed artist, architect, and theorist whose multifarious practice spans painting, sculpture, robotics, costume and set design, and architecture.” Busy guy.
The exhibition comprised large, multi-canvas paintings, some small paintings, and some floor-based sculptures. It was the large paintings that I was particularly taken with. And herein lies the rub: these paintings were, in many ways, even more of a piece than Fallon’s, and yet somehow it didn’t feel that way. The large paintings were made from gobbets of bright acrylic paint mixed with some sort of gel medium and smeared onto the canvas in zones. Okazaki is interested in the idea of “time as a constraint—one that art makes visible in order to overcome it,” and the zones in these paintings are “units of making.” There can be quite large temporal gaps between these units.
One of my many disparate interests is the way in which painters use their outputs as records of the making: paintings where you see a painting, but also, simultaneously, the act/process of painting. I’ve long tracked back to Schwabsky’s argument that a fundamental consequence of the modernist turn is that “we can never go back to seeing what is in a painting before seeing it as a painting.” I think that Hurvin Anderson occupies this space. It’s not just about being painterly, or splashy, or drippy. It’s more than that. There’s a generosity to this kind of work. At its best, you feel pulled in, as though the artist is letting you into their world and their process.
Okazaki’s paintings are initially even more iterative than Fallon’s (at first glance they all look the same). And yet the more you look, the richer they get. Once you start seeing the different areas as discrete units of time, there is a whole extra layer of nuance. Another aspect that I found interesting was the way that many of these paintings were made on canvases that had been pulled together into assemblages. I don’t think we were told if they were planned this way. I suspect not, but I can’t know. I have been thinking recently about ways of making pick ’n’ mix paintings that can then be hung in a variety of ways. If this is what I was looking at, then it was quite carefully put together. There is a juxtaposition of colour, shape, and orientation, but it is subtle. I could happily believe that random canvases were pushed together, but similarly I could also believe that the whole process was planned.
This is, I suppose (no, I believe), something that I really value and search for in art of almost any form: ambiguity. I really enjoy that tension between wanting to know and leaning into the not knowing. I think this is the space where I am often happiest: that interstitial space that hovers between resolution and dissolution. It is a difficult space to occupy. Too much resolution and the work starts to feel closed, as though everything has already been decided for me. Too much dissolution and it risks becoming vague, evasive, or just tasteful mush. I am not super-interested in scraping together waxy and indistinct oil paint and calling that uncertainty. But I’m also not especially drawn to a Sarah Morris-style type of mercilessly diagrammatic picture-making, where the image seems to have been fully engineered before it has had a chance to breathe.
I think what I am trying to find, both in looking and in making, is a kind of active uncertainty. Not ambiguity as a decorative effect, and not ambiguity as a refusal to commit, but ambiguity as a generative condition. A painting can be unresolved without being weak. It can be constructed without being dead. It can have a system without the system becoming the whole point. Maybe that is why the Okazaki paintings stayed with me. They seemed to understand that repetition does not have to mean sameness. It can be a way of recording difference, or delay, or return. It can be a way of letting time into the work.
This could be useful for me to think about in relation to my own current paintings. I am increasingly interested in works that can be moved around, reassembled, interrupted, or made to behave slightly differently depending on the conditions of display. I like the idea that a painting might not be one fixed thing, but a set of possible relations. That doesn’t mean abandoning composition or decision-making. If anything, it might require more decision-making, just of a different kind. The question becomes not only “is this painting finished?” but “what kinds of situations can this painting produce?”
Perhaps that is the distinction I am circling around. Fallon’s paintings made me think about what happens when a language becomes too settled too quickly, when the work begins to confirm its own formula. Okazaki’s paintings, on the other hand, seemed to keep the formula open. They repeated, but they did not simply repeat themselves. They allowed for reconfiguration, for time, for the possibility that the work might still be negotiating its own terms.
Maybe there is a useful space somewhere between formlessness and over-determination, between mush and machine, between the scratchy and scrapey indistinct painting, and the merciless diagram. I think that might be the zone I am trying to work towards. A painting that knows enough to hold together, but not so much that it stops moving. Something that has structure, but not certainty. Something that can make decisions without closing itself down completely. I suppose what I’m interested in is painting that holds its nerve in that in-between space: clear enough to be looked at, but unresolved enough to keep looking back.
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